Obsession

  “Son, thank you for bringing Matilde. I’m so happy that you…”

  “Nonna didn’t feel the same way. When she found out that she was a Martínez Olazábal, Aldo’s daughter, she looked at her very rudely. She made her feel very uncomfortable.”

  “Oh, no, you’re kidding! I’m sorry, darling. It must have taken her by surprise.”

  “Whatever. But it made her feel bad. Talk to her. I don’t want it to happen again.”

  Francesca watched her son leave. She was torn between two thoughts that generated different feelings. On one hand, she was thinking about Antonina’s reaction and on the other, about the ferocity with which Eliah had just defended Matilde. This was new in him. When Samara had been alive, he had always had to defend himself from his wife’s reproaches and she, Kamal and Alamán, whom Samara turned to in search of consolation, support and advice, had had to intercede. It had been a young, immature marriage.

  Matilde didn’t feel well, her head hurt and a light dizziness made her take Juana’s arm. She rested her head on the Aston Martin’s seat and fell asleep. She woke up when Al-Saud deposited her on the bed. She stayed silent and still, touched by how delicately he was taking off her shoes.

  “Eliah?” she mumbled, and stretched out her hand, which he took solicitously.

  “What?”

  “Make love to me. I need you.”

  The haste with which he undressed transformed into a gentle patience when he lay on top of her to make love. They didn’t fall asleep when they finished, but stayed wrapped in a warm, serene embrace. Matilde’s back was wedged into the curve formed by Al-Saud’s body.

  “What is the meaning of life for you, Eliah?”

  “Does it have to have a meaning? I think the whole ‘meaning of life’ idea is overrated. Living is trying to experience it as well as possible, nothing more.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever we like best.”

  “I like treating people.”

  “I know.”

  “And you, what do you like best?”

  Being with you, he thought without hesitation, but he stayed silent because he thought it sounded cheesy, even if it was sincere.

  “I like flying.”

  “Flying planes?” Al-Saud drew a yes on her back. “What kind of plane?”

  “Any kind of plane.”

  Matilde turned around.

  “Do you really know how to pilot planes?”

  “Yes, I know how to pilot planes,” he answered, a smile spreading across his face as he saw her enthusiasm.

  “Where did you learn how to fly?”

  “In L’Armée de l’Air.”

  “The Army of the Air? Is that like the air force in Argentina?” Al-Saud nodded. “You were a soldier?”

  “You don’t hold soldiers in very high esteem, it seems.” Matilde denied this with a slight shake of her head. “The truth is that I never felt like a soldier. In reality, I was a war pilot.”

  Matilde remembered the magazines that she had seen in the library in his office, World Air Power Journal.

  “Were you in a war?”

  He was afraid of that question, not just because of the answer, but because of the memories it stirred up, especially those of the Gulf War. Because of his reputation as an excellent shot, his superiors had assigned him the missions with the most specific and least accessible targets. Toward the end of the conflict, they sent him to bombard a bunker in Amiriyah, a suburb of Baghdad. The shot would need surgical precision, as the AS 30L had to be fired through the slats of a ventilation system, a space that was only just wider than the diameter of the Sepecat Jaguar aircraft’s missiles. The mission was a success, the bunker was destroyed and the four hundred people inside were reduced to ashes. Four hundred civilians, mostly women and children. The news had infuriated Al-Saud, who, in an unusual display for a measured man like him, had punched the wall and screamed, demanding to be put in front of the intelligence agent who had told him that it was a military bunker. Though they had explained to him that it was and that Saddam had filled it with civilians as human shields, Eliah didn’t find peace. He had massacred four hundred innocent souls.

  He was further disappointed with the political leaders, when, in spite of the United Nations Coalition winning the war, Saddam Hussein was allowed to remain in power. For months they had been told that they were battling a demon. The news that the enemy would be able to continue to torture the Iraqi population hit the men who had put their lives on the line like a bucket of cold water. Al-Saud had realized that the outcome of a war depended more on a political solution than a military victory. The next year he had participated in the Balkan wars until one night, in the middle of a mission, he felt ridiculous firing missiles because a group of corrupt, ruthless politicians, sitting in armchairs in their comfortable houses, had ordered it. When he got back to the Orange base in France, he applied for a discharge and shut himself away on his estate in Rouen.

  “Yes, I was in a war. But I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t have good memories of it.”

  “Of course. A war could never bring back good memories.”

  This latest revelation plunged them into silence, as they allowed their eyes to eloquently do the talking for them. Her anger had vanished as soon as she found him taking off her shoes carefully so as not to wake her up. What right did she have to reproach him for not telling her about his dead wife or his past as a war pilot?

  “I don’t know why I said what I did.”

  “What?”

  “What I said to you when you were holding Dominique. It seems to have upset you. I don’t want you to feel pressured. I know you have a project you need to do. I’m not going to get in your way.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  They returned to their communicative silence. Matilde smiled at him and caressed his nose with her fingertip. He kissed her finger.

  “If I had to define the meaning of life,” he announced, “I think that screwing like we just did and then flying my favorite plane would sum it up pretty well.”

  Matilde covered her mouth before letting out a giggle that touched Eliah’s heart.

  “How often?”

  “As often as we want!”

  “What a magnificent meaning you’ve found for life!” They laughed, and as the laughter died down and their faces grew serious again, Eliah knew that Matilde was about to say something that he didn’t want to hear. “Yasmín told me you were married.”

  He let out a groan by way of confirmation and lowered his chin to hide his eyes. He cursed Yasmín inwardly, imagining himself giving her the thrashing that his father had never given his spoiled little girl.

  “I would have liked for you to find out from me and not Yasmín, who’s…I don’t know how to say it in Spanish!” he grew exasperated. “My sister is a cancanière.”

  “You mean a gossip. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “She’s jealous.”

  “Did Yasmín love her? Your wife, I mean.”

  “Yes, they were very good friends, even though Samara was older than Yasmín.”

  Matilde hadn’t expected how much it would hurt her to hear him say that name. She was anxious to ask him more about Samara, about the accident that had killed her, the baby they were expecting, his life as a pilot and his experience in the war. Did you love her a lot? More than me? But instead she closed her eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

  Gérard Moses deciphered the message from Anuar Al-Muzara detailing the coordinates and date at which Udo Jürkens should present himself. It was urgent that he come up with the plan to raid the OPEC headquarters so they could get hold of the ransom money as soon as possible.

  He walked down the gloomy hallway on the top floor of the mansion where he and Shiloah had grown up. The echo of his footsteps on the long oak floorboards deepened the loneliness and silence that had characterized the mansion for years. In the past, Shiloah’s laughter and his friends’ voices had filled it with l
ife and light. The busts and marble statues were laid out in a row down the hall, covered in white sheets, as were the paintings, casting strange shadows. Udo’s gigantic figure appeared silhouetted against the far end of the hall, and Gérard suffered a moment of panic, which he was able to conceal in the half-light.

  “Boss,” Jürkens said, “I didn’t know you had returned from Herstal.”

  “I arrived this afternoon. What happened with the three Iraqis?”

  “Everything went according to plan.”

  “It worked, then?”

  “Yes, the nerve agent worked. They’re dead.”

  “The sayid rais will be pleased with the news. I need you to give me the details for the report. But first I want you to tell me about Al-Saud’s new girl. What have you found out?”

  “Tonight, Al-Saud brought her to a party in a mansion on Avenue Foch, on the corner of Malakoff.”

  Despite his exhaustion and the fact that his new medicine turned his stomach, it only took Gérard a few seconds to remember that was the location of the Al-Saud mansion. He took her to his parents’ house. He turned brusquely to hide the tears that pricked his eyes. It was the first time he had brought a girl home to his parents. Samara didn’t count because, like her brothers, Anuar and Sabir, she had lived in the house on Avenue Foch once Prince Kamal had become their guardian. He cleared his throat.

  “Udo, bring her here. I want to meet her.”

  “Piece of cake, boss.”

  “Then you’ll kill her. We have to be sure that she’s not going to start asking questions about Blahetter’s experiment.”

  “According to the letter he deposited in the locker in Gare du Nord and trusting that the translation is correct…”

  “I speak Spanish very well, Udo. Didn’t you find the plans where I said you would?”

  “Yes, of course. Then in that case, she certainly had no idea about anything. The letter never got to her.”

  The finality of Udo Jürkens’s conclusion bothered Moses.

  “We can’t be sure.” He couldn’t shake off the lingering suspicion. “She could have read it and then put it back in the locker at Gare du Nord.”

  “The envelope was sealed and didn’t look as though it had been opened.”

  “Regardless, you’ll get rid of her, Udo. We’ll use her to test one of the other nerve agents the sayid rais provided me with. Or would you rather not do the job? Perhaps she has seduced you as well?” Jürkens gave him a look Moses didn’t know how to interpret; he debated between reading it as guilty or stunned. “I don’t want to leave any loose ends,” he declared calmly. “Once you have accomplished that task, you will meet Al-Muzara to plan the attack on OPEC. I have the coordinates here.”

  * * *

  * * *

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  * * *

  The week turned out to be very busy. Al-Saud’s head jumped from one issue to the next. There was no room in his schedule for any more commitments; his phones—the landlines and cell phones—rang every few minutes; Victoire and Thérèse pestered him with messages, requests and reminders, they filled his desk with slips of papers and asked him to sign checks and contracts. Al-Saud, however, didn’t miss out on two pieces of news: the publication of the story in NRC Handelsblad, the Dutch newspaper, and the photos that Amburgo Ferro had taken of the assassin of the three Iraqi boys, because Edmé de Florian had confirmed what they had known since Saturday afternoon: they were dead. The autopsy results wouldn’t be ready for some time. For now Alamán and Peter Ramsay were working on Amburgo’s photographs, because they weren’t good; the Italian had taken them from a distance with an inadequate lens. They tried to establish, with the help of software, whether the measurements of the assassin from the abandoned factory in Seine-Saint-Denis matched the one who had broken into the apartment on Rue Toullier.

  Al-Saud leafed through the newspapers while he wolfed down a sandwich. He was looking for stories about the assassination of the Iraqis; there was only a mention in the local Seine-Saint-Denis newspaper, where they speculated about the possibility of an overdose, in spite of the fact that neither syringes nor narcotic residue had been found. He pushed the newspaper away and cleaned his hands to answer his cell phone. He looked at the screen: it was Zoya. Her voice sounded tense.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Masséna is doing well in the Caribbean. He seems more relaxed. I’m calling because Natasha has got back in touch with me. She asked me for money. She seemed nervous, almost desperate.”

  “How are you sending the money?”

  “She gave me a bank account number.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Give me the number. Do you have it handy?” Zoya read it out to him. “Did she ask you for a sum in particular?”

  “No, but I was planning on being generous. As I said, she seemed very nervous. And even though I insisted, she didn’t want to tell me where she was.”

  That night, Al-Saud entered the base through the garage on Maréchal Harispe. He shut himself up with Peter and Alamán in the projection room, ready to listen to their conclusions. They reviewed the tape, viewed the photographs on the screen and reviewed the results of the software analysis.

  “The measurements match, as do the skull shapes,” Peter reported.

  “Taking a base from the profile of the assassin that Amburgo photographed, which is very blurry, as you can see, the program developed a possible face. The man would look, more or less, like this.”

  The potential face of the assassin appeared on the screen in front of Eliah, gigantic on the wall-sized screen. The similarity to the man who had broken into the apartment on Rue Toullier was amazing.

  “It’s him,” he murmured. “It’s the same son of a bitch.”

  “That shouldn’t surprise us,” Alamán pointed out. “The one who broke into Matilde’s house is the one who hired the Iraqis to attack her. He didn’t want to leave loose ends, so he killed anyone who could testify against him.”

  “I mean,” Al-Saud said without taking his eyes off the sketch created by the software, “that it’s the same son of a bitch who tried to kidnap us in 1981.”

  “We also scanned the Identi-Kit that came from the head nurse’s description,” Alamán continued, ignoring his brother’s comments, “and we compared it to the photos and the recording.”

  “And?”

  “There are some points of similarity,” Ramsay admitted, “but nothing that gives us a definitive result.”

  “It’s the same guy,” Al-Saud declared. “All three of them are the same son of a bitch.” And the same one who was there during the attack on Sabir and Shiloah on the opening day of the convention.

  During dinner, Al-Saud’s somber mood worsened when Juana’s cell phone rang and it was for Matilde.

  “Auguste Vanderhoeven, from Healing Hands,” Juana announced with a disappointed air, since she had hoped it would be Shiloah Moses.

  Matilde’s happiness, the way she insisted on speaking to him in French and giggled boiled Al-Saud’s blood. When she hung up, Matilde turned to Juana.

  “Auguste called to let us know that Dr. Rolf Gustafsson, the Swedish doctor who has lived in North Kivu for the last twenty years and is one of the few specialists in vaginal fistulas in the world, is passing through Paris.”

  So you call him Auguste, Al-Saud thought furiously. He thought that Matilde was acting as elated and happy as if she had just won the lottery.

  “Does he work for Healing Hands?” Juana wanted to know.

  “No, no. Dr. Gustafsson has a contract with the Congolese government. He’s been there twenty years!” she repeated. “He could tell us so much.”

  “Who is Auguste Vanderhoeven?” Al-Saud interrupted.

  “You know him,” Matilde hurried to explain. “You saw him the day you came to pick me up from the Healing Hands headquarters, when you got back from your trip. Remember?”

  Al-Saud nodded and looked down at
a piece of meat he was bringing to his mouth. Of course he remembered the guy who had stared at Matilde like a fool.

  “What did he want?” he asked, without looking up.

  “He wanted us to have lunch tomorrow with him and Dr. Gustafsson.”

  “And are you planning on going, Matilde?” he asked, deliberately slowly, emphasizing the Matilde as he bored into her with his eyes. Juana kicked him under the table.

  “Yes, I’m planning on going,” she answered, unsettled and timorous. She got up to help Leila serve dessert.

  “What’s got up your ass?” Juana burst out once Matilde had gone into the kitchen. “Why are you talking to her like that, in that snide voice?”

  “I don’t want her to go to lunch with that guy. He has the hots for her.”

  “So?”

  “So?” He was scandalized. “I don’t want anyone to have the hots for my woman.”

  “Oh, my darling!” Juana got impatient. “Well, if you don’t want anyone to have the hots for your woman, pick one with the face of a cockroach and not a Vogue model. My God, Eliah! You’re a worldly guy, how can you get so worked up because a colleague from Healing Hands has invited her to a working lunch?”

  “I’m a worldly guy so I know what men are like!”

  “The fact that Matilde is crazy about you and only has eyes for you doesn’t come into the equation? And that you’re the only man she’s ever been devoted to, that either?”

  “She’s too innocent and humble to realize what she provokes in men.”

  “She’s innocent, I agree with that, and humble too, but she’s not a moron. Stud,” she said, and softened her frown and her tone, “don’t turn into another Roy and suffocate her with jealousy. Mat values her liberty because she had to work hard for it. If you turn against her, you’ll lose her. I know her, Eliah, I know her like no one else. She seems weak and tender, but she’s a lion when it comes to fighting for what she thinks is fair. And you treating her like an idiot and not trusting her is completely unfair.”